It's the perfect work companion for meme fans – a robot that sits on your desk and communicates entirely through GIFs. Called Peeqo, this personal robotic assistant consists of a Raspberry Pi micro, motors, numerous microphones, a USB speaker and an attached LCD screen. The pint-sized machine uses voice recognition from Google Speech API and API.ai to listen and respond to your queries. Peeqo is a personal robotic assistant consists of a Raspberry Pi micro, motors, microphones, a USB speaker and an attached LCD screen.This pint-sized machine uses voice recognition from Google Speech API and API.ai to listen to your queries to respond with the appropriate GIFs When users ask him a question, a light on the back of its head turns on, which signals he is thinking about the query. The robot also has a camera that lets it to record what is'sees' and it can play music from Spotify when asked.

When Whitney Bailey bought an Amazon Echo, she wanted to use the hands-free calling feature in case she fell and couldn't reach her phone. She hoped that it would offer her family some peace of mind and help make life a little easier. In some ways, she says, it does. But because she has cerebral palsy, her voice is strained when she talks, and she struggles to get Alexa to understand her. To make matters worse, having to repeat commands strains her voice even more.

In April, United Airlines hit a huge pocket of public relations turbulence after a passenger was forcibly removed from one of its partners' airplanes. The incident raised questions about blindly following procedures, passenger rights, and United's executive leadership. Here's another question it raised: Could artificial intelligence (AI) have prevented the embarrassing drama from even happening? Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter. AI and machine learning are already impacting many areas of business, such as marketing, as well as most industries, including retail.

When we think of the AI platforms that are shaping how we use voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google and Microsoft's Cortana. But there are other players that may prove to have a compelling value proposition of their own. Sherpa.ai, a voice assistant out of Spain that also provides predictive recommendations with a focus on the Spanish language, today is announcing that it has expanded its Series A by $8.5 million to $15 million as it passes 5 million active users of its app. Investors include Mundi Ventures, a Spanish VC fund focused on AI, and Alex Cruz, the chairman and CEO of British Airways. In a still-heated tech climate where startups are raising tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in rounds that sometimes happen only months apart, Sherpa's Series A has been a comparatively slow burn: the startup first announced a Series A of $6.5 million nearly three years ago.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Since Amazon Echo shipped in late 2014, smart speakers and voice assistants have been advertised as the next big thing. Nearly four years later, despite the millions of devices sold, it's clear that like many other visions of the tech industry, that perception was an overstatement. Testament to the fact: Most people aren't using Alexa to make purchases, one of the main advertised use cases of Amazon's AI-powered voice assistant. Voice assistants have existed before the Echo.